Revisited: What Dying Teaches Us About Living with Death Doula Alua Arthur

A Bit of Optimism

The Optimism Company from Simon Sinek

Business, Education, Careers, Self-improvement

4.8 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 17 March 2026

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Team Simon here! While A Bit of Optimism is on a short break, we’re revisiting a few episodes you helped make some of our favorites. We’ll be back with brand-new conversations next week, on March 24th, 2026. In the meantime, we’re bringing back an episode that explores a word most people like to avoid: death. We dance around the subject or use vague euphemisms to not hurt anybody. But what if being open about our deaths meant we could live happier lives? That’s where Alua Arthur comes in. Alua is one of the most prominent death doulas in the country, which means it’s her job to help people die. She offers support to her clients and their families as they embark on their dying journey, tackling everything from financial planning and insurance policy to emotional support and grief. Before this work, Alua was a lawyer, but after a life-changing encounter that forced her to confront mortality in a new way, she shifted her path entirely. Now she has dedicated her career to helping others prepare for the end of life with clarity, compassion, and even a bit of humor. In this conversation, Simon and Alua talk about why our culture struggles to talk honestly about death, what she’s learned from the people she’s accompanied in their final days, and why remembering that life is finite can help us live with more presence, gratitude, and intention. This… is A Bit of Optimism. --------------------------- For more on Alua and her work, check out: https://goingwithgrace.com/ & @GoingwithGrace‬ ---------------------------

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	What is the most interesting secret or story you've ever heard somebody tell you on their deathbed? I've heard so many secrets. Oh, tell one. What's your favorite? Come on, come on. About the kids, about mistresses. Yeah. Other families. Other families. There's so many other families. So many other families. And I think the 23 and me and Ancestry.com and all those places, we're about to find a
0:22.2	whole lot of our families. That's right. It's all coming out. Yeah. Nobody's dying with secrets
0:26.7	anymore. Let's talk about death. Dying. Being dead. Those words are so jarring, literally just hearing them make many of a squirm.
0:40.3	It's such a morbid conversation. Who wants to have it? Or maybe we're thinking about it the wrong way.
0:46.3	That's where a Lua Arthur comes in. She's flipping the script.
0:50.3	She's a New York Times best-selling author and one of the leading death doulas.
0:55.0	Like a doula helps some people prepare for birth, death doulas help other people navigate life's final chapter, with clarity and grace.
1:04.3	But for those of us who aren't currently in the process of dying and aren't navigating grief,
1:10.0	thinking about death may actually be the best hack to focus on life.
1:16.9	This is a bit of optimism.
1:24.3	So I'm always fascinated by people's career paths, right? Doctors and lawyers tend to know pretty young that they're going to be a doctor and lawyer because you have to make a decision, you know, pretty young to start going through that amount of schooling, etc. And I have to believe that being a death dula wasn't like your childhood dreams. You weren't helping your teddy bear take their final breaths.
1:45.8	I'm so curious how someone finds themselves doing this.
1:49.7	It was a sharp right turn.
1:51.3	I was a lawyer.
1:52.8	I started out on the path of lawyer.
1:55.2	So I did all the schooling and took the bar
1:57.8	and started practicing and was not having a good time.
2:00.8	It was not working for me. It wasn't a fit. And I also just felt frustrated and still do that. We asked young people to choose their professions so early in their lives, you know, and like commit to something, something with the big financial responsibility of law school. I put that as a side. But I was a lawyer. And then life came and worked its magic on me and grief
2:19.1	worked its magic on me and here we are practicing death work instead. So did you start in grief
2:24.2	worth and find yourself to death work or do you talk about them? Is that one thing? To me,
2:29.0	they're inextrably linked. You know, they belong together. They can be separate though because
2:33.8	grief doesn't exist only with
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Optimism Company from Simon Sinek, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Optimism Company from Simon Sinek and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.